From the Department of Half-Baked Ideas

Diversity 101 practice is to save a slice of the pie for a woman or a minority, and if you can score a two-fer and get a minority woman, you’re golden. But just that one slice. Do a couple of seasons where you give away three or four slices of pie, or hell, the whole thing, and you induce panic. What if there is never any pie for me? What if I was born too late to be entitled to any pie? Goodbye, Diversity Slot.

There is no way out of this power struggle as long as all you’ve got is one small pie. You can slice smaller pieces, handing out readings instead of productions, but that inevitably leaves people hungry. We need a bigger pie. We need a radically bigger pie. Divvying up this little pie is already contentious, and will get more so. The Powers That Be being The Powers That Be, it could take a century to achieve true diversity in this allot-a-piece-of-pie fashion.

How do we make the pie bigger? I'm not the only one wracking my brain on this one. The Jubilee proposal is a radical pie-redistribution project for the 2020 season. It's a provocative proposal, and boy has it stirred up reactions.What can I do, as an individual artist? I wrote a response to the crazier Jubilee responses. I make sure I talk up shows I’ve seen and liked. When you see something, say something. I’m doing more to see Off-Off Broadway productions this season. And when someone tweets “Guy! Seriously! Go See This Now!” how about...going to see it.

That’s all I've got so far in my quest for pie-expansion, but I’m committing to it. When I get too discouraged by The Count, all-male seasons, and the presidential campaigns, I remind myself I've got high-class problems. For those whose concerns are more basic, I'll be donating to City Harvest this year.